The Negative Effects Of Food Advertising

Food advertising to children is a controversial issue that is considered as a source of attention to many investigators and analysts due to its influential impact on children’s food choices and parents buying behavior. Food advertising is the primary type of advertising that people go through on a daily basis. Nowadays, the industry of food advertising is growing enormously in the middle east region and Malaysia as a result of the huge amount of food advertisements, especially junk food ads that reach people directly and indirectly through various mediums that deliver advertising contents to the audience. Children and youth are the main target audience for fast food advertisers, mainly because of their purchasing influence, exposure to TV and

In the middle east and Malaysia, there are huge marketing promotions of food high in fat and many parents are having a tough responsibility in which they are confined between picking a good selection of food products to maintain their health and the health of their children or to succumb to their desires and their children’s requests to buy unhealthy advertised food products. Therefore, fast food advertising has a profound negative influence on children’s food choices and parents buying behavior in the middle east and Malaysia as it attracts them through several mediums and themes, resulting in unhealthy eating habits and an increase in the consumption of unhealthy food that causes negative health effects as obesity and weight gain, along with a tendency in the middle eastern society and the Malaysian to eat western style fast foods, which in return creates a growing demand for western fast food outlets that rises from the western culture influence on

It attracts children as a main target audience using numerous mediums and themes that feature food advertising contents. These mediums include television channels, internet, films, videogames, and supermarket promotions. Currently, advertising through television is the most prominent medium that advertisers use to promote food products to children, because it is the platform that many children spend much of their time on watching their entertaining channels. While watching the TV, children are exposed to a lot of embedded advertisements that contain animations, pictures, appealing statements, music, colors, cartoon characters, and celebrities. All of these are some of the themes that advertisers use to grab the attention of children while watching TV. According to Nassar & Zien (2012) who analyzed the effects of TV ads on children in the middle east, “children pay more attention to what they see rather than to what they only hear” (p.268). Hence, fast food advertisers take this opportunity to their advantage by designing advertisements with many visual triggers along with a nice food packaging and a great displaying of the product. A study about the effects of food ads on children and parents found that the majority of children in a sample size of 75 favored to have the unhealthy advertised food item they saw on TV than a